Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method for prioritizing agent intervention into automated customer engagements in a communication system. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention provide a system and method for managing and prioritizing agent intervention into automated engagements with customers in a contact center.
Description of Related Art
Companies may provide for customers to be engaged without the use of a human operator. For example, companies may provide automated instant message features on their websites to allow customers to ask questions without the need to provide live human operators (referred to as “live agents”) to answer the questions. That is, live agents are not needed to respond to the customer's queries; instead the responses are automatically generated by an automated engagement system. In this manner, companies can both service a larger number of customers and reduce the amount of live agents needed to engage with customers.
Automated engagement systems rely on natural language processing to determine what the customer is requesting and provide an answer. In addition to providing an answer to the customer's query, automated chat systems may generate a confidence factor. The confidence factor corresponds to the level of “confidence” that the automated engagement system has in its answer. Said differently, the confidence factor corresponds to how closely the automated engagement system believes it understood the customer query and how closely it believes its answer corresponds to what the customer is looking for. For example, if a customer's responses do not correspond to a pattern expected by the automated engagement system, it may follow that there is low probability that the automated customer engagement will provide a satisfactory experience for the customer. Therefore, the confidence factor may be relatively low. In such cases, a live agent may be able to better serve the interests of both the customer and the company.
In order to ensure customer satisfaction with the automated customer engagement, a live agent may be brought into the engagement when the confidence factor falls below a threshold value. Administrators (e.g., contact center supervisors, or the like) of the automated engagement system can adjust the threshold at which live agents intervene in automated customer engagements. However, this is difficult to do continually and in such a manner as to reflect the relative availability or scarcity of live agents within the system. Particularly, as the availability or scarcity of live agents can change rapidly due to demand. Furthermore, adjusting the confidence factor threshold in such a manner fails to take into account information about the proficiency of individual live agents so that the live agent brought into an automated customer engagement is best suited among available live agents to achieve a satisfactory resolution. Due to the difficulty of dynamically adjusting the confidence factor threshold, many conventional systems employ a static confidence factor threshold at which live agents intervene in automated customer engagements.
Thus there is a need for a system and method for managing and prioritizing live agent intervention into automated customer engagements.